Review: New Books by Anna Gavalda, Daniel Sada, George Singleton and Others

Calloustown

By George Singleton

261 pages. Dzanc Books. $15.95.

In these short stories, all set in the fictional backwater of Calloustown, S.C., George Singleton works territory that is not terribly fashionable these days but is durably appealing: wacko-Southern. His characters attend the Invasion of Granada festival (“more of a re-enactment than a festival”). They meet women at the Mid-Atlantic Independent Driving Range Owners of America trade show. When a bar owner named Worm leans a sign out front that reads “Topless,” that means “he’d be in there behind the bar not wearing a shirt.” The stories start with sentences like: “Until my wife discovered the unending tunnel in our backyard, we’d approached our record for ignoring each other, which is to say she’d not spoken to me for four days.” Most hilariously, the town’s residents share a disdain for General Sherman, for not understanding “Calloustown’s meaningfulness” and passing it by on his devastating march to the sea.

Simone

By Eduardo Lalo; translated by David Frye

159 pages. The University of Chicago Press. $17.

A dispirited writer in Puerto Rico receives a series of mysterious notes from a stranger in “Simone,” which won the lucrative Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize for a Spanish-language work in 2013. The book is split almost exactly in half, before and after the letter-writer’s identity is revealed to us and to the narrator. What results is a split reading experience. The first half of “Simone” is grounded in a convincing existential weariness (“Geography and travel were infinitely less real than my feeling alone”) and genuine psychological suspense. Once the stranger is known — a Chinese woman emotionally damaged by her past who now works six days a week at a local restaurant — the pair’s erotically charged relationship proves less interesting than the previous mystery, and the prose describing their desires grows occasionally purple.

One Out of Two

By Daniel Sada; translated by Katherine Silver

100 pages. Graywolf. $14.

Constitución and Gloria Gamal are 40-something twins, identical in every way but for a mole on one of their shoulders. Hard-working seamstresses, they live only in each other’s orbit, rendering love an abstraction “over there, in the impossible beyond: tenderness was there, in the heavens.” When they are invited to a wedding, they flip a coin to see who will go and who will stay behind to work. Constitución wins and ends up meeting a man who is a “thunderbolt sundering” the twins apart. They eventually decide to take turns dating the suitor, who’s none the wiser, though he may wonder why his paramour is significantly more randy from time to time. It’s a ruse that can’t last. In this slim, fable-like story, the sisters eventually have to decide whether to remain so tightly bound that no one else can get in.

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Life, Only Better

By Anna Gavalda; translated by Tina Kover

210 pages. Europa Editions. $17.

In “Mathilde,” one of the two novellas that make up this book, a 24-year-old lives with twin sisters and works as a negative commenter on various websites. Her anonymous comments send site owners running to her brother-in-law to improve their web presence. When she loses a bag with 10,000 euros in it, she becomes obsessed with the unkempt man who finds and returns it. In “Yann,” a 26-year-old man happens into dinner with older married neighbors. Basking in their affection and repartee is “one of the most beautiful evenings of my unpromising existence,” and proves to him how hollow his own romantic relationship has been. Both stories have a sentimental streak, but Ms. Gavalda, a best-selling author in her native France, puts them across with charm. “You don’t meet the people you love,” the husband upstairs tells Yann, “you recognize them.”

Numero Zero

By Umberto Eco; translated by Richard Dixon

191 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $24.

It’s 1992, and a group of Italian journalists is tasked with creating a dummy newspaper to intimidate the rich and powerful in the latest novel from the conspiracy-minded Umberto Eco. Colonna, a 50-ish failure, is enlisted to write a book about the newspaper’s operations. Early on, “Numero Zero” is made up of light digressions, with the journalists discussing their craft (like how to write “a denial of a denial”) and analyzing trends like cellphones (“It’s a fashion that’s going to fizzle out in a year, two at most.”). When an editor named Braggadocio posits that Mussolini didn’t actually die in 1945, but lived a shadowy and influential existence for decades afterward, the book turns darker and knottier. Now 83, Mr. Eco retains his mischievous and robust imagination. This slender novel, which feels like a mere diversion compared with his more epic works, is nonetheless stuffed with ideas and energy.

Bird

By Noy Holland

165 pages. Counterpoint. $24.

Noy Holland’s first novel, after three story collections, is about a woman struggling to settle into domesticity and remembering an earlier, reckless relationship with a man named Mickey. Past and present are fluid in this novel, and readers will have to pay close attention to avoid seasickness. Ms. Holland’s style is aggressively poetic. This works well enough for sentences like these, describing an upset baby: “She thrashes in her crib, unboned and blind, good as blind. The weight of her body pins her, strands her in the drift of her sheet: she’s been dropped by the wind, breached from the sea. Shored up here, needing.” But the density is unceasing. And left off the leash, this style leads to overwrought observation and dialogue, like one character’s description of a young man: “The moon is on him. It draws the tides in him toward the air — like dew, opened up, like he’s blooming, like he is some succulent moon-white bloom dropped into my bed and lethal.”

A version of this review appears in print on November 26, 2015, on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Newly Released. Today's Paper|Subscribe